One of the responses is a copy of the other, made after I used cut and paste in a futile attempt to put a perfectly reasonable and on-topic comment in a location in which it would have a good chance of being read. "Futile" is really the key word. I submitted a problem report a few days ago. Nobody got back to me. Probably nobody is going to, and why would they? The notion that the things we make are supposed to work is just so last millennium, isn't it? As long as we think we know what we're doing and we can get everybody else to either faith in the illusion or be driven off like the infidels they are, all will be well, will it not?

No, I don't really think that way, but a lot of people seem to, and a fair number of them seem to be in management. How often do we run into people who clearly do not give a damn about their own jobs, and yet never seem to get fired? The failure of Buzzfeed's comment system to work for my new account is, I am told, not a new development. I know somebody who apparently ran into the same problem last spring. Did it get fixed? No. Will it get fixed? Probably not.

But that's fine. What really matters is that a developer is going to be encouraged to feel good about himself, without having to do anything to earn those good feelings, and he's going to feel really good about that. He's going to have good things to say about management, and that makes management's life easier. Of course, this will leave users seething in rage and frustration, but who cares about them? It's not like they're real people. Does anybody ever see them around the water cooler or hear them speak? They don't count, and if anybody senses in this a suggestion that management is motivated more by moral cowardice than by anything like a concern with excellence, for shame. That's not a nice thing to say at all, and Heaven forbid that we should ever be anything other than nice.

Even if "nice" sometimes sounds like just another way of saying "passive aggressive."

PS. So far, I've tried to get the system to accept a correction to this post, replacing the word "excellent" with "excellence" (which makes more sense in context), and after clicking the "publish changes" button for the 12th time, and clearing the cache on my computer, I find that those changes are not publicly visible, and neither is the last line in my post, above.

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